Philadelphia's Hoots & Hellmouth welcomes you into the acoustic woodshed

Philadelphia bluegrass/gospel band Hoots & Hellmouth will perform Sunday at Salt of the Earth in Fennville.FENNVILLE — The guys that make up the Philadelphia-based roots/experimental band Hoots & Hellmouth are the product of the Westchester, Penn., music scene.

Their sound — a thigh-slapping wall of soulful acoustics that grabs you by your tapping foot and doesn’t let go till you join them on the proverbial porch for a sing-a-long — is the product of old-time America.

“These are songs that came out of a hard day’s work, or whatever situation they were going through at that time, and what they played collectively in the local community gatherings,” said vocalist and guitarist Sean Hoots, of the “old time” music that inspires their sound. “They were a way for everybody to let off steam and just have a good time.”

After years playing music with other bands, the guys of H&H are finally doing just that: having a good time. The group — including Hoots and fellow bandmates mandolinist/vocalist Rob Berliner, guitarist/vocalist Andrew Gray and bassist John Branigan — will perform beginning at 7 p.m. Sunday at Salt of the Earth in Fennville.

“We were all involved in other bands prior to this one, but they were all loud, fully amped, with drum sets, that whole thing — loud, unhinged rock and roll with a variety of different influences among the three of us,” Hoots said of the group’s core trio, including himself, Berliner and Gray. “This is the first band that any of us have been in that’s all acoustic, that doesn’t have a drummer.”

The change came in early 2005, when Hoots and Gray started playing together through the course of hanging out at a Westchester open-mic night hosted by a friend who introduced them to a lot of “old-timey” music. By June of that year, Hoots was booking dates for a 10-date tour down South, and the group’s been “chugging along ever since,” he said.

The group has since released two full-length albums on Drexel University-based indie label MAD Dragon Records: 2007’s “Hoots and Hellmouth” and last year’s “The Holy Open Secret.”

At the beginning of this month, the band decided to make good on their community-centric ethos and started the “The Window in the Woodshed,” a multimedia blog that will feature new material throughout the year, including videos and MP3s.

“Folk music, it says it in the title, it’s music of the folk, it’s people’s music,” Hoots said. “It’s music that people play when they come together and celebrate together, mourn together, whatever it is. … It meant so much more in lifetimes past.”

Now the band — whose sound is listed as “acoustic mayhem” in its bio and has been described by Paste Magazine as “where soul meets barnstomp” — is doing its best to bring the meaning back to music, making this “the year of the woodshed, where we allow everyone to come into the woodshed and see what our process is, and in the process of that define the process for ourselves,” Hoots said.

It’s a goal that’s not too shabby for a handful of guys who, according to Hoots, were never really even trying to start a band in the first place.

“We were never trying to be traditionalists or revivalists or trying to bring anything back in any sense,” Hoots said. “We were just really inspired and turned on by a lot of the sounds and the general ideology of older music … We were so sick of our previous band experiences that we were just like, (expletive) it, we just want to play music and enjoy it.”